


Replay

by MillyVeil



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, BAMF Natasha Romanov, Barton/Coulson UST, Clint Barton Needs a Hug, HYDRA are bastards, Hurt Clint Barton, Hurt/Comfort, Medical Procedures, Medical Trauma, Natasha Romanov Has Issues, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, Natasha Romanov Needs a Hug, Protective Natasha Romanov, Questionable Neuroscience, Recovery, Some people in SHIELD are bastards too, Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:49:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,122
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25307776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MillyVeil/pseuds/MillyVeil
Summary: For a moment, Natasha's anger goes from seething to full-on blazing, then everything in her goes abruptly and unnaturally still. The world slides into a familiar, high-definition focus where every detail is acutely crisp and over-saturated. She takes in Mitchell and his nurse and reevaluates. Every action she has observed, every reaction and inaction, every spoken and unspoken word, every sideways glance; she reevaluates itall, because the shapeless sense of wrong has suddenly coalesced into something very tangible.ORYou better not fuck with Clint on Natasha’s watch.
Relationships: Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton & Phil Coulson & Natasha Romanov
Comments: 85
Kudos: 147





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to my most excellent and thorough beta, the lovely Teeelsie who always makes my stuff so much better!

Natasha strides down the empty corridor with the nurse half-running behind her to keep up, but she doesn’t care. She knows exactly where she’s going, the door is already in view at the end of the corridor, and she’s not wasting any time getting there.

“Please don’t tell him I called you,” the nurse says behind her, a little out of breath.

Natasha stops abruptly, and the woman narrowly avoids crashing into her back. Natasha had assumed the call she’d gotten not half an hour ago had been on the order of the doctor in charge, but obviously not. The nurse had been vague and evasive on the phone, the only thing crystal clear had been the message that Natasha needed to return to Medical. Now.

Natasha had been out of bed and on her way in a matter of minutes. She’d braced herself for what she would find once she got there, because a call like that is never a good thing. Finding out that it had been made outside the chain of command adds another component to the tension in her; a harder, darker one. A medical emergency is bad enough, but whatever prompted this takes it to another level. 

The nurse throws an anxious glance over her shoulder. “Please,” she repeats. “I could lose my job.”

Natasha opens her mouth to ask her what the hell is going on, but just then she hears a muted sound through the door up ahead, and the nurse is forgotten. She at the door in seconds and pulls it open. She takes in the room, and in a heartbeat the tense worry turns to anger, white-hot and dangerous.

Clint gives a ragged sound of relief when he sees her and slumps down on the bed. He tugs clumsily at the restraints. “Off,” he pants, his voice hoarse. “Natasha, get ‘em off.” 

A nurse hovers by the door, and she stumbles as Natasha shoulders past her. Her indignant squeal is just background noise, hissing static without significance, because every bit of Natasha’s focus is on Clint.

The doctor by the bed turns at the sound. “What—?” The startled look on his face turns into a glower when he spots Natasha. “You can’t come in here.”

Mitchell. Natasha knows this asshole. 

“What the hell is wrong with you people?” she seethes as she approaches the bed. “He just spent four days drugged and tied down and beaten, and you idiots thought reenacting two thirds of that was a good idea?”

Mitchell puts himself in her path and holds up his hand. “It’s for his own safety.”

Natasha doesn’t stop. The doctor raises his chin stubbornly and stands his ground, and she pins him with a cold, hard look. He will either move on his own, or she will assist, and he won’t like the way she does it. It’s a game of chicken she knows she’s going to win. She’s right. She’s almost on top of him when he grudgingly angles his body to the side and lets her pass.

She sits down on the edge of the bed. Clint makes an awkward attempt to curl toward her, but the restraints stop him short. He’s pale and sweaty. The four-day stubble does nothing to disguise the raw, painful-looking abrasions that run up one side of his face. It looks like road rash, like he’s been dragged face down over concrete or asphalt.

“Hey,” she says. She puts her hand lightly on his arm, clear of the bulky, temporary splint that runs from his knuckles almost all the way to his elbow. Dark bruises run up his upper arm and disappear in under the sleeve of the scrub top they’ve put him in. “Take it easy, you’re okay.”

She’s so angry she feels like she’s vibrating with it, but she carefully smooths all the sharp edges from her body language. Aggression around Clint when he’s halfway out of it doesn’t always go over well, even when it’s not aimed at him. When that happens, it’s a toss-up which way he’ll go - hostile or cowering. There’s no shortage of horses to bet on when it comes to the origins of his reactions. Most are old, some not so old, and the whole thing is a Pandora’s box she’d rather not crack open if she can avoid it.

He looks up at her, his breath still harsh. There’s a glassy look to his desperate eyes, subtly different from that of the painkillers she knows for a fact he’s been given. Some kind of sedative, she assumes.

“You’re okay,” she says again, but Clint gives a small, desperate shake of his head. The fingers of his good hand flex anxiously. A trail of drying blood runs down the back of his hand, towards his wrist. He must have pulled his IV out at some point. 

Clint gives the restraints another fretful, futile tug. His face twist in a pained grimace, and he squeezes his eyes shut as his fractured wrist must have protested the pressure.

She gives his shoulder a light squeeze. “Stop that,” she chides gently. “You’re hurting yourself.”

“Get ‘em off,” he moans again.

She runs her eyes over the straps that hold him down. She wants them off almost as bad as he does, but before she does that, she needs to figure out where his head is at. Judging from Mitchell’s face, there’s a reason they are there in the first place.

She leans in and takes Clint’s face carefully in her hands. She waits patiently until he cracks his eyes open and squints miserably up at her. “I’ll take them off,” she says, “but not until you relax.”

“You can’t do that,” Mitchell protests angrily behind her.

She ignores him. “You need to relax,” she repeats. “Can you do that for me?”

She keeps her voice firm, makes it an implicit order. It’s easier on Clint in situations like this. He’d admitted that once, halfway down a bottle of tequila and still trying to find his footing after a messy job that had ended with him spending three very long days delirious and hallucinating from a nasty neurotoxin. Letting someone else take over for a while, someone he could trust wouldn’t fuck him over at the first opportunity, was a relief sometimes.

“Yeah.” Clint nods jerkily. “Yeah, I can.” 

She looks into his bloodshot eyes and tries to gauge the truthfulness of the answer. He seems closer to the cowering side of the equation than the hostile one, but even in the shape he’s in, he lies the way she does: easily and well, and the last thing she wants to do is set him free and have him spin off into an anxiety-driven attack on the staff. She keeps searching his eyes, but there’s no hint of deception there, just bone-deep exhaustion and a wordless pleasepleaseplease so loud she can almost hear it. 

She runs the pad of her thumb over the raspy stubble. “Alright, then.”

“You can’t do that,” Mitchell snaps again.

She hears him take a step closer. Wisely for him, he doesn’t touch her.

She starts in on the first cuff. Clint’s eyes go wet and shiny as she works the buckle. She pretends she doesn’t see it. Four days of beatings, of sleep deprivation and next to no water or food will strip self-censorship from anyone.

They still don’t know how he’d been made. The job had been to take down a decaying remnant of a HYDRA cell that until a few short months ago had been too low on the food chain to warrant SHIELD’s attention. The group had mostly been involved in cyber-attacks of various kinds, causing havoc in urban traffic systems, bringing down IT systems for a number of government agencies around the world, spreading disinformation. But when they had started targeting power infrastructure installations, taking remote control over dams and generators in hydropower plants and overloading them to the point of catastrophic failure, they had been judged to be potential trial runs for attacks on a larger scale. Potentially on one or several nuclear power plants, and that had raised the stakes enough for SHIELD to take notice. 

Natasha had been the original front person for the operation, but late intel had revealed that their target had associations with a Russian businessman she’d had dealings with in the past. The risk had been deemed small that he’d show up and blow her cover, but even so, she’d found herself relegated from the front lines and tasked with providing backup.

The job hadn’t specifically called for a female operative, so Jason Pearce had been tagged to fill her spot. Pearce is an experienced agent and had been a good fit, but four days before the operation was to go down, he’d been clipped by a drunk driver on a crosswalk. The Powers That Be had decided that since Clint was already read in, he’d be the stand-in for the stand-in. Clint had laughed loudly and at length at Natasha’s displeasure over the role reversal.

Once the operation was underway, he had quickly established contact with their marks, and things had moved in the right direction. Then without warning, the situation had done an abrupt one-eighty. They still don’t know how he’d been made, but the second they’d realized it, Natasha had dialed his burner, had told him to get out, get out _now_ , but she’d been too late. She’d heard a loud noise and then he’d made a choked sound before the line had abruptly gone dead.

Backup hadn’t been far away. It had arrived to Clint’s location mere minutes later in the form of four heavily armed teams that moved in at the same time. They had swiftly secured the hotel that had been his base of operation, but by the time they’d kicked down the door to his suite, he had already been gone.

SHIELD’s massive machinery had started moving immediately, but Clint had been nowhere to be found. All cameras inside and outside had conveniently been out of order or turned off, no eye witnesses had been willing to step forward, no leads, nothing. They had worked around the clock, but when the timer had climbed past one hundred hours and they still had nothing, something inside Natasha had gone cold and hard as she started preparing for an outcome she’s seen far too many times before.

Then an anonymous tip had found its way to the right ear, and Clint had been located. Natasha had been on the search team, and they’d found him four hundred miles from the site of the op in the middle of the Cascadian nowhere, stripped naked, unconscious and badly beaten in the basement of a long-ago abandoned research station. They’d transported him here, to SHIELD’s facility in Seattle for medical attention.

Her fingers work the strap out of the first buckle. The restraints are strong and unyielding, but the cuffs are lined with a soft, supple material to keep from chafing the skin of struggling patients. A few seconds later it falls away and Clint pulls his splinted arm close against his chest with a relived, shuddery sound.

Natasha starts in on the opposite one. He’s not pulling actively now, but tension has crept back into the remaining straps. “Relax your arm,” she reminds him.

He lets out an unsteady breath, but manages to give the restraints a fraction of slack, enough to allow her to get the second cuff off. It doesn’t take long until the rest of them have been removed. Clint twists and curls up on his side, arms and legs drawn in close.

Natasha sits back and waits for the tension to drain out of his body, for his ragged breathing to calm, but it doesn’t. Instead a flinch goes through him, and he sucks in a sharp, loud hiss of pain.

She frowns. He didn’t move, did nothing to provoke that reaction. “What’s wrong?” He suddenly uncurls and moves to sit up, but she puts a hand on his shoulder, keeps him down gently. “No, come on, lie back.”

He pushes at her hand and keeps trying, so finally she gives up and slides her arm under his to help him sit up. With a moan he pulls his knees up and hunches over. She catches his hand when he starts fumbling at the bandage at back of his head.

“Don’t,” she says the same moment Mitchell snaps, “Don’t touch that!”

Natasha gives Mitchell a glare over her shoulder, her fingers still wrapped around Clint’s wrist. It’s not the first time the two of them have run into Mitchell, and he has rubbed her the wrong way since day one.

The first time had been here at this very facility in Seattle. Clint had needed an x-ray on what turned out to be nothing but a badly sprained ankle, and she had needed four stitches. Mitchell had been abrasive and dismissive from the moment he had stepped inside the treatment room. Clint hadn’t said much, had just frowned at his back when the man left.

The second time had been in Houston. Natasha hadn’t needed any medical attention that time, but Clint had bounced off the hood of a pretty little red car during a foot chase downtown, and had left a head-shaped dent in its windshield. Mitchell had apparently transferred there at some point, but his attitude had been the same. As soon as Clint had stopped puking from the concussion and could walk in a somewhat straight line, he had signed himself out AMA. 

The last time had been a few years ago, here in Seattle again. The moment Clint had spotted the man, he’d climbed off the gurney and left. Natasha had caught up with him in the staircase and dragged him back, because asshole doctor or not, bleeding that much wasn’t healthy.

No, she doesn’t like Mitchell, and Clint likes him even less.

Clint is still pulling weakly at her grip, still trying to reach the back of his head, but then he suddenly twists and slumps heavily against her. She’s awkwardly balanced on the edge of the bed and has to brace her foot on the floor to keep him upright.

“Want it gone,” he moans against her shoulder. “I want it _gone_.”

Whatever they gave him must really be taking him for a loop, because the plaintive, almost childlike tone is far too naked to come from Clint, far too revealing. That’s not like him at all, not even when he’s been roughed up to this extent. 

“I know, but you need to leave the bandage there for now.”

She doesn’t know what happened to his head. The wound isn’t big. She had watched the medics clean the blood away and bandage it. Maybe he fell. Maybe his captors hit him with whatever left the stripes of deep, dark bruising down his back, his legs, his arms. It was probably a cane. The marks tell her it had been about an inch thick, and that it had been wielded with brutal force. They’d hit him with something thinner, as well. Slashing welts crisscross the cane marks. There’s evidence of electric shocks, too. Small, clustered burns on the soles of his feet. Matching ones low on his abs and on the inside of his thighs. From the looks of it, whatever they’d used on him had a lot more juice than a run-of-the-mill personal protection stun gun.

The amount of abuse reeks of overkill, and that tells Natasha something about the people who did this to him. They’re either complete amateurs who don’t know the first thing about extracting information, or Clint had managed to aggravate them past the point of rage by being, well, Clint. Another possibility is that they’d been fueled by some twisted ideological reason, beating him because he somehow represented an opposition to their cause. Or they might simply have taken pleasure in inflicting pain on someone else.

True sadists are rare, even among HYDRA followers, so the last one goes to the bottom of her list. And knowing Clint, he had probably mouthed off a bit, but it’s unlikely he would have gone far enough to result in this. Despite persistent rumors of the opposite, his survival instincts are very well-developed. He wouldn’t have survived this long if they weren’t.

So Natasha’s money is on amateurs or fanatics. With HYDRA the odds are leaning more to the latter, but it doesn’t really make any difference. If she ever gets her hands on them, the payment she will exact will be the same either way.

She twists to look at Mitchell and the nurse. “What the hell happened? He was asleep when I left.”

The nurse’s eyes flicker in Mitchell’s direction and something wordless passes between them. It’s the nurse she had shoulder-checked by the door. Natasha never forgets a face, so she knows this is the nurse who had assisted Mitchell the last time. She hadn’t been unfriendly, but she definitely hadn’t been warm and approachable.

Before Natasha can call the two of them on whatever is going on, Clint tenses sharply against her, and his fingers dig painfully into her arm. The sound he makes leaves no room for misinterpretation. That’s pain. And that’s what she had heard from outside. She cranes her neck to get a better look at his face. She knows for a fact he got painkillers both during the transport here and on arrival. He shouldn’t be hurting. She’s surprised he’s even awake with the amounts she’d watched them give him. 

“What’s wrong?” she asks. “What hurts?”

“Back,” he groans against her. “Legs, arms, feet, head. Everything. Keeps moving.” 

“He woke up half an hour ago, complaining of pain,” Mitchell’s nurse says.

“Why didn’t you give him more painkillers?” Natasha demands.

Once again, the woman’s eyes slide uncomfortably over to Mitchell, and Natasha narrows her eyes. She doesn’t know what’s going on, but she definitely doesn’t like it. 

Mitchell has started making notes on the tablet in his hands, scowling down at it. “We did,” he says curtly without looking up. “We’ve given him more morphine.” 

“Obviously not enough. Give him more.”

Mitchell finishes up with the tablet then slides it in under his arm. “It can take a while before morphine reaches full effect, and we just topped him up. Give it more time.”

“No, now,” Clint whimpers. “I need more _now._ ” Then he freezes, every muscle in his body abruptly tensing up.

“Breathe,” she says when seconds go by and she can’t feel his chest move. “Breathe through it.”

He shakes his head, a small, desperate movement, but the human body is relentless in its demand for oxygen, so eventually he lets out a strained breath. The inhalation that immediately follows is too fast, too shallow.

“Slower,” she instructs, and starts counting for him, gives him a cadence to follow. 

He tries, she can tell he really does, but he’s brutally knocked off pace every two or three breaths by another flinch and another sharp sound of pain. She hates seeing him like this, but Mitchell is right; IV morphine usually gives a measure of relief fairly quickly, but the full effect isn’t always instant.

Clint cries out, and she winces as the fingers around her arm dig in even harder. When she forces her own fingers in under his to make him ease up a bit, he makes a wobbly, distressed sound. “It’s okay, I’m not going anywhere,” she assures him. She looks at Mitchell, silently daring him to disagree.

He doesn’t, he just glowers at her, then turns and heads to the door. “Stay here,” he tells the nurse. “I will check back later. Call me if you need me.”

Natasha is more than happy to see the door close behind him. She peels Clint’s clammy, reluctant fingers from her arm and takes his hand in hers instead. It shouldn’t take more than ten, fifteen minutes to get the full effect of the morphine. She glances at the clock over the door, establishing a baseline in time, and waits impatiently for the morphine to dull the edges of his pain.

The second hand moves around the clock face as the minutes tick by, but if anything Clint’s pain seems to increase. He slides back down onto the bed and curls up around himself. He keeps shifting, sharply and restlessly, and the hisses turn into hitching gasps of pain. _It keeps moving_ , he’d said, and now she can follow the pain in the way his good hand moves from his shoulder to his arm to his hip to his ribs to his knee and then back to his shoulder. She keeps telling him, soon, it’ll get better soon, just hold on, but he keeps hurting.

It doesn’t make sense. Clint is a lightweight on morphine, usually out cold on half the dose it takes her to even feel it. The pain doesn’t make sense, either. He was beaten all to hell, so of course he’s going to hurt, but unless his bruises are touched or he moves carelessly, it should be a dull, continuous ache. The cuts and electrical burns are more acutely painful, but they shouldn’t cause this kind of sharp, intermittent pain. Not even the fractured wrist should cause this, not when it’s already been splinted and immobilized.

When eleven minutes have passed and there’s no sign of relief for Clint, she runs out of patience. “Get Mitchell back here,” she orders the nurse who stayed behind. “Barton needs more morphine.”

The nurse leaves without a word. She takes her damn time to return with Mitchell, and Natasha is seething by the time they walk through the door. Mitchell is an asshole, and not the first one she’s encountered in SHIELD, but this is taking things way too far.

“Give him more painkillers,” she demands.

Mitchell walks over to Clint. “I don’t want to give him more morphine just yet,” he says.

Clint whimpers at the words, his fingers clenching around her hand. 

“Then give him something _else_!”

“Not yet.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Because I said so,” Mitchell snaps. “I don’t have to justify the course of treatment to you.”

Her anger goes from seething to full-on blazing for a moment, then everything in her goes abruptly and unnaturally still. The world slides into a familiar, high-definition focus where every detail is acutely crisp and over-saturated. She takes in Mitchell and his nurse and reevaluates. Every action she has observed, every reaction and inaction, every spoken and unspoken word, every sideways glance; she reevaluates it _all,_ because the shapeless sense of wrong has suddenly coalesced into something very tangible.

They are still here, people at SHIELD who think Clint should have been put down like a dog for what he did under Loki, and the fury at walking in and finding him in restraints fades to something insignificant and pale compared to what rises in her now. If this is Mitchell trying to get back at Clint, she will fucking _end_ him.

She carefully extricates herself from Clint and gets to her feet. Her mind is running two parallel tracks: dealing with Mitchell, and making sure Clint is safe. Lists are already scrolling at the back her mind: routes out of the building and the compound, available material she can use, nearby safe houses SHIELD has no knowledge about, medical staff she knows she can trust, strategies and possible threats to her mission. She doesn’t believe for a second they’ll just let her take Clint, not in his condition, and a confrontation with SHIELD security is pretty much guaranteed.

But first things first.

She faces Mitchell. “You have sixty seconds to get him something for the pain,” she tells him, her voice low, “or I will go get it myself. And don’t think for a moment I won’t break your goddamn fingers to get the dispensary key card you’re clutching in your pocket.”

For a moment Mitchell’s expression is one of shock, then outrage takes over. “Is that a _threat_?”

Threat. Promise. Right now, they’re pretty much interchangeable.

Mitchell glares at her, and her mind gives a soundless, derisive snort at the obvious attempt to intimidate her, to bully her into compliance. Men much bigger, much meaner, and vastly more dangerous than he have tried and failed.

“I will have you removed if you even _think_ about interfering with his care!” Mitchell takes a sharp step forward.

Natasha mentally thanks him, because her fingers are itching to make this asshole hurt. But then Clint’s breath catches like it’s been punched out of him. She twists and makes a grab for him, but misses, and he rolls clumsily off the far side of the bed. He lands with a thud on his hands and knees and struggles to get up, but collapses back to the floor when he puts weight on his abused feet.

She gets to her knees next to him just as a full-body jerk goes through him. He pivots forward with a gasp, before crumpling fully to the ground. Then he’s dry-heaving. He retches and jerks again, and again, and he can’t seem to catch a full breath between them to even cry out. Natasha reaches out to put her hands on his shoulders, but stops before she can touch him. She doesn’t know what to do, what’s hurting. She doesn’t want to cause him more pain.

“Do something,” she growls at Mitchell.

Clint suddenly goes rigid, and his eyes snap wide open. His mouth opens, but no sound comes out at first. When it finally does, it’s not a cry that’s torn out of him, it’s a scream. Natasha has heard men make sounds like this before, she has _made_ men make sounds like this, and compartmentalizing is usually as easy as breathing, but this time she feels sick. So sick. Clint chokes on the scream, and it trips over into wheezing, coughing sobs as he curls around himself, clutching his arm.

“Jesus Christ,” Mitchell’s nurse mumbles behind Natasha.

The sound snaps Natasha out of her indecisiveness, and she’s on her feet in an instant. She grabs the front of Mitchell’s white coat and backs him forcefully across the floor, his arms wind-milling for balance. She slams him into the wall and pins him there with her forearm across his throat.

“Help him,” she snarls. 

Mitchell has four inches and a good seventy pounds on her, but little of that weight is muscle, and he has none of her training, so when he tries to break free she has no problem keeping him in place. She increases the pressure, and he makes a choking sound.

“Ketamine,” he wheezes. “Karen, get ketamine.” He flails his free arm in the direction of the door.

Natasha doesn’t turn, but she hears the nurse leave the room at a run. Natasha knows that the first thing she will do is get on the phone with security, and she’s pretty sure the report the dispatch will get means it won’t be the regular SHIELD campus security that shows up. They’ll send in a tactical team. Better trained, better armed, used to dealing with situations that involve violence and people who can inflict it with maximum efficiency. People like her.

She spins Mitchell and twists his arm up behind his back, presses him into the wall. With one hand she works her phone from her pocket. She needs backup. Mitchell keeps struggling, and she almost loses her one-handed grip on the phone. She curses under her breath and shoves the man against the wall again, hard, before dialing one of her three pre-programmed numbers.

She presses the phone to her ear, her fingers tightening around it as she listens to it ring one, two, three times. Clint is still crying behind her, gasping sobs that seem to fill the room. The call finally connects, but the surge of relief dies as it goes straight to voicemail. No message, just a beep. She wonders if the recording will capture the sounds, if Phil will realize what they are.

“Forty-four,” she says, resorting to one of their earliest codes.

_We’re in trouble, Phil. We need you. Help us._

She keeps the phone pressed to her ear for a few seconds longer, hoping against hope that he will pick up, never mind that voicemail doesn’t work that way. “Forty-four,” she says again.

She ends the call and slips the phone back into her pocket, then uses both hands and her knee to keep Mitchell pinned up against the wall until the nurse returns a few short minutes later. She must have been running, because she’s out of breath when she comes through the door. She hastily rights the rolling tray that had fallen over and deposits the supplies in her hands on it.

“How much?” she asks Mitchell as her hands tear open the sterile package of a syringe. Her voice is trembling.

That’s right, Karen, Natasha thinks darkly. Be afraid of me, be very afraid.

“One hundred,” Mitchell groans.

The nurse loads the syringe and kneels next to Clint. She tries to get him to stay still, but he’s beyond that. Without an IV port to use she has to try three times before she gets the needle in right.

Natasha has seen the effect of ketamine in the field. It’s very potent, and the onset is usually a matter of seconds. She holds Mitchell in place and watches as the ketamine goes in. It’s slow, very slow, and Natasha has to clench her jaw to keep from demanding that Karen go faster, because she knows some drugs can have nasty side-effects if given too rapidly. Karen’s nervous eyes keep flicking up to Natasha every few seconds.

When she’s done, Natasha nods towards the far wall. “Over there.” She shoves Mitchell in that direction. “Get over there. Both of you.” They’re not much of a threat to her, but she doesn’t want to turn her back on them, and until Clint’s pain is under control she’s not about to let them leave the room.

Mitchell herds Karen to the wall. He looks equal parts furious and shell-shocked. 

Natasha kneels next to Clint again. She half-expects him to be gone already, carried away into merciful oblivion, but he fumbles for her.

“Make it stop,” he gasps. Tears are streaming from his eyes, running down the side of his face and disappearing into his short hair. “Please, I can’t, I--”

She takes his hand again. “Not long now, I promise. Just hold on.”

He doesn’t seem to hear her. “Make it stop.” He cries out again.

Natasha sits there on the floor and waits for his eyes to start to go unfocused, for him to slip away into the merciful dissociative state that ketamine brings. Twenty agonizingly slow seconds tick by. Some tension should start to leave his muscles soon. Thirty seconds. Soon, she repeats to herself. Soon. Sixty second. Ninety.

Two minutes pass. Three. Nothing. Clint keeps hurting, keeps twisting and gasping and crying out. This isn’t right. Morphine may take a while to kick in fully, but ketamine is pretty damn instant. _Should_ _be_ pretty damn instant. She gets to her feet and stalks to the tray where the half-empty vial sits. She picks it up and checks the label. It reads ‘Ketamine’.

“What’s this?” she asks coldly and holds it up between her thumb and her index finger.

Mitchell glowers at her. “Ketamine,” he says. He’s rubbing his shoulder. “It’s a painkiller, it’s very strong and—“

“I know what ketamine is.” She gives the vial a sharp little shake, pins Karen with a hard look. “What is _this_? Saline?”

“What—? No, it’s _ketamine_.”

Just then she hears the sound of squealing tires from outside. She looks out the window to see two armored vehicles pull outside the building. Eight people get out. As predicted, in full tactical gear. Dammit. Her window of opportunity is closing fast. She pulls the curtain shut, killing the sightlines from any rooftops around, just in case they decide to put someone up high.

Her phone vibrates in her pocket and she pulls it out. The number on the display almost makes her knees go weak with relief. 


	2. Chapter 2

“Talk to me,” Phil orders when she answers, his voice tight. “What’s going on?”

“Barton’s in trouble. We need to move him.” Natasha gets down on her knees next to Clint, puts her hand on his shoulder in an attempt to offer some comfort.

“Where you are?” Phil asks.

“Back in Medical. How fast can you get here?” She glances at the door. Security is almost certainly setting up outside already, but hopefully they’ll think twice about barging in on the Black Widow without a damn good plan how to execute the operation. Her reputation is all she’s got going for her right now.

“I’m working on it. Where exactly in Medical are you?”

“Sixth floor, room…” She looks at Mitchell’s nurse. “What’s the room number?”

“Six-oh-five.”

Natasha relays the answer to Phil. "Use the east stairwell," she adds. "It’ll take you right to his door." 

“What day is it?”

She stops and blinks at the unexpected question. “What?”

“What day is it,” Phil repeats calmly.

For a brief of moment she fails to see the logic in his question, but then suddenly she can. A hollow, cold feeling suddenly materializes in her chest. She though he was asking about her location and her weapons because he’d already been trying to get the information he needed to set up the extraction, but that’s not it at all. He doesn’t believe her. _Phil_. The one person she shouldn’t have to convince when she says something is horribly wrong. He thinks she’s been compromised somehow.

“It’s not in my head.”

“Humor me.”

Her fingers tighten around the phone. “It’s not in my goddamn head, Coulson!”

“I didn’t say it was, but when they radio me to say you just attacked a doctor for no reason, you can understand if I get a little concerned.”

His voice is infuriatingly reasonable, and in that moment she hates his unflappable calm, his logic, his analytical mind, because he should be as angry and outraged as she is. It’s _Clint_. “They’re messing with him.”

“How?”

She puts the phone on speaker and holds it closer to Clint, lets Phil hear his harsh breathing and the ragged cry when another pang of pain hits. She switches the speaker off and puts the phone back to her ear. “ _That’s_ how. These bastards aren’t giving him enough painkillers. It’s Thistle all over again.”

There’s a brief pause, and when Phil’s voice returns, it’s darker. More dangerous. “Who’s the attending?”

“Mitchell,” she spits out. “He had Barton in restraints when I got here.”

Phil mutters a curse under his breath. He’s well aware of their strained relationship with Mitchell. She hears a crunch of shoes on dry gravel, then a distant slam. The acoustics take on an echoing quality. A staircase, she thinks. Somewhere Phil can talk privately.

But before he can say anything more, he gives another muttered curse.

“Hold on.” He sounds further away suddenly. “Excuse me, ladies. I’m going to have to ask you to head out that way.” It’s his civilian-wrangling voice; polite and unthreatening and gives absolutely zero room for arguments. “Yes, that way. Thank you.” There’s a muffled response from the ladies in question, then the faraway sound of a heavy door closing. “Wake the hell up, Cato,” Phil snaps a second later, much less politely. “There are still civilians wandering around down here.” The answer must come on a comm line Natasha can’t hear, because there’s a beat of silence, then, “well, look harder.” Phil’s voice comes close again. “Natasha? Still there?”

“Yes. We need to move him.”

“I’ll get Mitchell out of the picture, but we can’t move Barton. Not right now.”

“Why the hell not? He’s better off _anywhere_ but here.”

“That cut at the back of his head? It’s a surgical incision. They implanted something. I found out a few minutes ago, and I was literally just about to call you when they contacted me. At first we thought it was some kind of tracker, but that’s looking more and more unlikely.”

Her stomach goes painfully tight at the words ‘surgical incision’. “What did they do to him?” She looks down at the dressing at the base of Clint’s head. She had assumed the blood was from some kind of blunt force trauma.

“We don’t know,” Phil sighs. 

“But they’ve removed it. Right?”

She looks down as Clint makes a hoarse, distressed sound. Some part of his compromised brain must be listening, because he goes for his neck again. “I want it gone,” he moans. “I want it out. Get it out.” 

Natasha wedges the phone between her ear and shoulder and catches his wrist. Jesus, context really is everything. Clint had told her, he’d _told her_ as soon as she got him out of the restraints. She just hadn’t understood what he meant.

“It’s still in there,” Phil says, and he suddenly sounds so very tired. “It’s got parts that look like they’re going deep into his brain, and they don’t want to risk anything before they know more about it, but they’re working on it.”

“Who?” she demands. “Who’s working on it?” She hasn’t seen anyone overly concerned with Clint’s head, and with an unknown device in his head, they should be _all over_ him, doing tests, monitoring him, working _actively_ to understand it, but they’re not.

“They’ve called in pretty much every SHIELD neurologist and neurosurgeon and biomedical specialist there is. External resources, too. Some are in Seattle, but most are working remotely, studying everything they got; the scans, the x-rays, the EEG data they collected after they discovered it, the blood work. From what little they’ve told me, none of them recognize the tech.”

Natasha tries to digest that. If no one in SHIELD has seen it before, it’s beyond cutting edge, and that doesn’t make sense. Nothing in the intelligence collected on the HYDRA splinter cell had said they had any kind of involvement in these things. Cybercrimes and brain surgery aren’t even tangentially connected.

But that’s something for someone else to look into. Her objective right now is Clint.

“Have they talked to Stark?” she asks.

“They’re talking to SI’s neurotech division. Among others.”

“Call Stark directly. He’ll help.”

“This isn’t exactly his area of expertise, Natasha. If we need more cooperation or resources from SI, I’ll contact him directly. But first I’ll handle Mitchell. Kev Breitling is the acting Medical Director in Seattle. I’ll try to get a hold of him and ask him to take over until we’ve sorted everything out.”

She’s relieved to hear Breitling’s name. From anecdotes Phil has shared over the years, she knows the two go all the way back his Rangers days, and even though she doesn’t know Breitling beyond having been treated by him a few times, he’s been a fixture at SHIELD for as long as she can remember. She knew he had relocated to the West Coast, and that he had steadily risen in rank over the years, but she hadn’t known he’d made acting medical director. 

“Do you even know if he’s here on site today?” she asks.

“No, but I’ll find out.”

“You do that. How long until you can here?” Breitling is better than Mitchell, but she’s not going to relax fully until Phil gets there.

“Stern is on his way to take over the last of the cleanup, but he’s still two hours out.” Something beeps on Phil’s end. “Hang on.” He’s gone for a few seconds, then his voice returns, tenser. “Fury. He’s got security screeching in his ear. Let me call you back in a second.”

“To hell with Fury,” she snaps. “Call Breitling and get him over here.”

“He’s number one on my call list, but until he can get over there, you need to stay calm. They’re treating it like a hostage situation, clearing the building as we speak, and there’s a very large amount of firepower gathering outside. If you go to all-out war right now, you’ll lose. _He’ll_ lose. So please, let me try to figure out what’s going on before you tear the place down.” Phil’s voice goes dark. “But trust me, if Mitchell is fucking with Barton, if _anyone_ is fucking with him in _any_ way, I will personally bring the goddamn wrecking ball.”

“Just make the damn call, Coulson,” she growls and presses the end button hard. She pins Mitchell with a hard look. “It just slipped your mind to tell me they performed brain surgery on him?”

“No, it didn’t, but I can’t discuss the details of Barton’s condition with just anyone.”

“I’m not anyone,” she growls. “I’m his goddamn partner.”

“And yet you’re not his listed as his primary medical contact _, are you_?” Some of Mitchell’s earlier attitude has crept back into his voice now that she’s not in his face, and she itches to show how wrong he is if he thinks he’s safe over there. “You might be used to bullying your way past people and regulations to get your way, but that doesn’t work with me.”

She clenches her teeth with frustration. He’s right. She’s not the one listed in Clint’s papers, Phil is. Just as Phil is listed in hers. That has rarely been a problem in the past, because STRIKE Team Delta has always been a unit, a Coulson-Barton-Romanoff package, and mothballed or not, they are still that to most people who know their team ever existed. They’ve always been kept in the loop when one of them was injured or sick.

She looks down at Clint just in time to see him reach for the bandage again, and she grabs his wrist. “Stop that,” she snaps, unable to keep the anger at Mitchell from making her voice sharp. To her relief, Clint doesn’t seem to notice the tone.

She pushes it down, tries to find her center again. Phil is right. She’s far too reactive right now.

“If he keeps doing that, we’ll have to put him back in restraints,” Mitchell says.

“Over your dead body.” 

“It might be over _his_ dead body,” Mitchell snaps back. “Part of that thing is right under the skin, and we have no idea how sensitive it is. It might kill him if he disturbs him. Are you willing to risk that?”

No, she’s not, but she’ll sit here and hold Clint’s wrists before she lets them tie him down again.

“We need to get him back on the bed and get the EEG set up again,” Mitchell continues. “He tore the electrodes off. We were trying to reattach them when he became unmanageable.”

“The man who had brain surgery performed on him reacted badly to people messing around with his head? Wow,” she says coldly, “I’m sure those things are not at all related.”

“I don’t like it either, but we need all the data we can get to figure that thing out, and to get it, we need the EEG. And material to set it up again. Material we don’t have in here.”

In light of the information about Clint’s head, Natasha really doesn’t blame him for not wanting strangers doing things to his head, but Mitchell is right; they need the information. She hopes her presence in the room will calm Clint enough so they can attach the electrodes and leads without him putting up a fight.

“Go collect what you need,” she tells the nurse. “ _You,_ ” she tells Mitchell, “are not going anywhere.”

“Oh, trust me,” he scowls. “I have no intention of leaving a patient alone with a mad woman.”

As the nurse leaves, Natasha wonders if she’ll return. She had come back with the drugs last time she left, but she might decide it’s too dangerous this time. Or security might not let her back in. The woman will no doubt be quizzed intensely by the team outside; milked for every detail on people’s locations, what kind of equipment is available in the room, what can potentially be used as weapons, what’s been said, what’s been done. Anything to give them an edge when they decide to move in. She just hopes Breitling or Phil has arrived here before they do. 

While she waits, she might as well start to set some things up. She brings her phone up and dials another number from memory.

“Agent Romanoff,” JARVIS greets her. “How may I help you?”

“Put Stark on.”

“Sir has requested not to be disturbed. Can I take a message?”

“I need to talk to him. It’s important.”

“I apologize, but my protocols do not allow me to interrupt unless it is an emergency.”

“It _is_ a goddamn emergency,” she growls. “Put him on.”

For a moment she thinks he’s going to refuse again, but then Tony is on the line.

“This better be good,” he says, his voice tired and snappish in the way it goes when he’s frustrated by a problem that resists solving.

“I need your help. It’s Barton.”

“If he’s enjoying the hospitality of some backwater county drunk tank again, I’m not bailing him out.” There’s a grunt and a dull, metallic clang. “That is your job.”

“Do you have any medical resources in the Northwest? Neurological resources. Seattle, San Francisco, Portland?”

The background noise stops abruptly. “What happened?”

“A job went south.”

“What kind of injuries does he have?”

“Contusions, lacerations, electrical burns, fractured wrist—”

“Jesus. That job didn’t just go south, Romanoff. It hit Antarctica.”

“Yes, it did,” she agrees darkly.

“Where are you now?”

The question pings something sharp in her, but she reminds herself that this is Tony, not Coulson trying to figure out if she has gone off the deep end. “Seattle,” she says. “SHIELD Medical.”

“Hang on, hang on, just wanna make sure I get this right. He’s at SHIELD. In a medical facility, with, you know, _medical professionals_ , but you still want to move him?”

“Not right this minute, but it might come to that.”

“Why? I know full well that the average competence level at SHIELD is depressingly low, present company excluded, of course, but it seems to me they should be able to handle that. And why do you want a neurologist? I’m no doctor, but none of the boo-boos you mentioned seem to warrant that.”

“Did I mention they performed non-consensual brain surgery on him?”

“ _SHIELD_ did? Motherfuckers!”

The volume is enough that she instinctively pulls the phone a few inches from her ear. “No, not SHIELD,” she snaps when she puts it back. “Jesus, Stark. The people who took him.”

“Oh. Well, I’m very glad to hear that, because I would have felt obliged to level every fucking SHIELD facility with the ground, and—” Tony cuts himself off abruptly. “Shit. That’s why my people are getting calls from SHIELD, isn’t it? It’s Barton. The staff contacted Pepper to make sure it was legit, but they didn’t say it was about him.”

It makes Natasha feel a little better to get confirmation that they really are working on it, just like Phil had said.

“Need to know. SHIELD wouldn’t have told them. Can you please ask Pepper if there’s anything closer than New York. And we need to set up a transport, too.”

“Consider it done.”

She hadn’t truly believed Tony would refuse a call for help, but it’s still a relief to hear the words. She’s fairly sure both she and Clint qualify as Tony’s friends these days, but that hadn’t always been a given, not even after they all joined the Avengers initiative. Tony would do just about anything for the people he cares for, but he carries grudges like nobody’s business, and she thinks he actually had a harder time getting past her reporting on him to Fury, than he did getting past Clint’s Loki-related part in the Battle of New York.

“Thank you, Tony,” she sighs. 

He makes a gruff sound. “Yeah, yeah,” he mutters. “Just don’t make a habit out of it. But at some point in the very near future, I expect a few more details. Like why the hell he can’t stay where he is.”

The moment he ends the call, Natasha’s phone beeps.

_ETA Breitling 10 mins. Security stood down for now._

She leans over Clint again. His breath is still ragged, but she realizes that during her short conversation with Tony, the strained sounds of pain have started to taper out just a little. They still come, but not quite as often. And they don’t sound quite as bad. “We’ve got backup coming in ten,” she tells him and gently runs her hand over his forehead, up over his lank hair. She watches for any sign that the touch is unwelcome, but he just closes his eyes and turns into it. “How’s the pain?” she asks. 

The tip of his tongue slips out to wet his chapped lips. “Little better,” he mumbles. 

“How about we get you back on the bed? I know you pride yourself on your ability to sleep anywhere, but this floor is hard. It’s killing my knees.” She could sit there all day, but Clint will be a lot more comfortable in the bed, and if this reprieve is temporary, she’d rather get him there before the pain escalates again.

He doesn’t protest, so she slides her arm in under him and helps him sit up. He’s shaky and strengthless, unable to offer much assistance, but Natasha somehow gets him to his feet. He wobbles precariously, off-balance and hunched over, but finally manages to lock his knees. Mitchell takes a step forward, reaching out as if to assist, but the look Natasha gives him with must tell him exactly how bad an idea that is, because he stops cold.

She eyes the distance to the bed. Clint hadn’t made it far in his futile and desperate attempt to get away from the pain, so she drapes his good arm over her shoulders and wraps her arm around his waist. His shirt is damp with sweat down his back, but she can feel him shivering. She starts to carefully maneuver him towards the bed.

They’re almost there when Clint makes a strange, choked sound, and then he’s suddenly dead weight in her arms. She curses and tries desperately to get a better grip, tries to hold him up, but he’s too heavy, and he takes down the rolling tray next to the bed as he goes down. It topples over with a metallic clang, scattering its content across the room. Her knees hit the floor hard as she attempts to keep his descent even moderately controlled, but it’s more luck than skill that keeps his head from bouncing off the linoleum. Every muscle in his body is rigid, and small, jerky tremors run through him. The lingering anger in Natasha snaps right out of existence, and the empty space fills up with fear so fast it almost overtakes her.

A moment later she’s unceremoniously pushed to the side by Mitchell, and it’s by the thinnest of margins she manages to hold back an actual animal snarl. If he sees the pre-strike tensing of her body he doesn’t show it, he’s already maneuvering Clint to his side, fingers sliding along the neckline of Clint’s twisted up shirt, making sure it’s not restricting his breathing. 

“Hit that button,” he orders Natasha. He directs her to a panel on the wall by the bed with a nod of his chin.

Natasha is up and there in a heartbeat, slaps her hand on the button. A muted signal is heard from the hallway outside. Seconds later a P.A. announcement follows. Her attention snaps to the door when she hears a clatter and the sound of boots from outside. She instantly knows what it is. It’s the security team moving in, reacting to the alarm.

Apparently Mitchell realizes what it is, too, because he’s on his feet instantly. He crosses the floor in a couple of long, fast strides and pulls the door open on the security team that’s already moving toward the door in a tight, tactical formation. Every weapon is raised and ready.

He lifts his hands and blocks the doorway with his body. “Stop!”

Natasha is already back at Clint’s side. He’s still shaking. She keeps half an eye on the door, on what she can see past Mitchell. Two persons in medical scrubs come around the corner at the end of the corridor at a jog, only to stop short at the wall of black-clad people blocking their way.

“We’re okay,” Mitchell tells the security team outside, his hands still raised. “It’s Barton. He’s having a seizure.” He looks over his shoulder at Clint, checking him over quickly. The P.A. announcement repeats again. “Let them through,” he says to the security team, motioning towards the staff trapped behind the team. “I need them in here.” 

Every hostage situation playbook says you don’t give the hostage-taker more hostages. Natasha’s eyes flit back to Clint when he makes another horrible, choked sound. Thirty seconds ago, the idea of leaving him with Mitchell hadn’t been on the table. It hadn’t even been in the goddamn building, but he’s seizing, he’s _seizing_ , and he needs them, not her.

“Now,” Mitchell barks when the security team doesn’t move. There’s another few tense seconds of stalemate, then he spins around with a curse and hurries back to Clint.

Natasha is half a second away from getting up and raising her hands, stepping out into the corridor and accepting the cuffs and the waiting holding cell without a fight, because staying in here at the expense of Clint’s medical care is not something she’s willing to do. But just as she starts to move, a low, muttered curse is heard from the team leader, and he makes a small motion with his hand. Mitchell’s people squeeze past the guards that step to the side.

They’re by Clint’s side in seconds. Natasha scoots back to give them room to work. She climbs to her feet, gets herself out of the direct line of sight from outside, and pushes the door closed from behind it. She has no idea why the security team leader decided to let them pass, but right now she doesn’t care. They’re here, that’s all that counts.

Clint keeps making those horrible sounds, keeps shaking, but then suddenly he goes boneless against the floor. The abruptness of it makes Natasha’s chest constrict again, because he’s suddenly so still, he’s not moving, and she can’t see if he’s even breathing.

Then he blinks, slowly and sluggishly, and the iron band around Natasha’s lungs release a fraction. 

“Get radiology to look over the head scans again,” Mitchell tells a lanky, dark-haired man who immediately crosses over to the wall phone and picks it up.

Natasha stays by the wall, taking the place Mitchell had occupied not a minute ago. She presses her back against the solid surface and tries hard to convince her heart to slow down while they tend to Clint.

“You’re okay,” the new nurse says to Clint, her voice calm and reassuring. Natasha watches her lean over and pull the blanket off the bed, folding it up and sliding it under his head. “You’re in Medical. You had a seizure, but you’re okay. You’re safe.”

Clint doesn’t react to anything that goes on around him, he just watches the room vacantly from under half-closed lids. His dull gaze glides over Natasha like she isn’t there.

His limp hand is picked up, and a finger is pricked to extract a few drops of blood. An oxygen clip goes onto another finger, and a blood pressure cuff is fitted over his arm, inflating with a soft hiss. The nurse keeps talking to him, reassuring him and repeating where he is, what happened, but she still gets no indication that he even hears her. Mitchell leans over him, penlight in hand, but he hasn’t even turned it on when Clint seizes again.

At the same time, the door swings open again with enough force that it bounces against the wall. She backs up sharply, falling into a defensive stance. She’s sure the team outside has changed their minds, that they’re coming to drag her out, but now that Clint is getting the help he needs, her incentive for playing nice has vaporized. She’s not leaving him before Breitling gets here.

But it’s not security coming through the door, it’s more medical staff. They join the ones already there, and she watches them work around Clint and each other in confident, well-synchronized patterns that inexplicably remind her of close combat, of moves and combinations repeated again and again until muscle memory has replaced conscious thought. It’s strangely reassuring, but it’s still an effort to stand down, to lower her hands and shift her body into a less aggressive configuration.

This seizure is shorter than the first one. Her inner stopwatch tells her it only lasts about ten seconds, but every single one of them feels eternity-long. Ten seconds is good, she tries to remind herself. She doesn’t have medical training, she’s not a neurologist, but she got a crash course in seizure disorders for an undercover job a few years back, and one thing she remembers very clearly is that time is crucial. Time is everything.

Clint doesn’t get much of a reprieve. Another seizure hits less than a minute later.

More machines are brought in, more IV bags with medication, more vials. Drugs go in, but Clint seizes again. And again. They’re all short, but they _keep coming_. Natasha stands by the wall and feels so achingly uselessness. Out there she can fight for him, she can bleed for him, but she can’t to a single thing to help him with this. All she can do is stay out of the way and helplessly keep counting the seconds each time he seizes, hoping that this one is the last.

Another one ends. They pull Clint’s shirt up and start attaching ECG electrodes to his skin, working quickly and efficiently, but they’re not done when the next one hits. They sit back and wait for it to end before finishing up and connecting the monitor. It starts beeping warnings immediately, until someone silences the alarm.

Clint has two more seizures, then finally, _finally_ they stop.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter has only partially been groomed by my excellent beta Teeelsie, so everything that's weird or wonky or just plain confusing is all on me.

Natasha stays out of the way, her back pressed against the cool wall. Clint lies where he dropped, limp and heavy as seconds turn into minutes, turn into more minutes, and thank God, there are no more seizures.

Mitchell and one of the new arrivals get Clint off the floor and back on the bed. A new IV goes in to replace the one he tore out. The ECG wires are checked and double checked, a nurse sticks a thermometer in his ear and takes his temperature, another one draws more blood. Clint’s eyes are open but glassy-looking and unseeing, and there's no reaction to the people moving around him and prodding him, talking to him, and he gives no answer to the questions Mitchell asks.

The worst edge of tension slowly faded from the room little by little, and the people who had responded to the alarm start dropping off, but Natasha still feels wound so tight it hurts.

“Turn down the lights a little,” Mitchell instructs, and a few seconds later, a portion of the bright overhead lights goes out, leaving the room at a more comfortable level. He turns his head and cants his head for Natasha to come closer. “A familiar face might do him good.”

He moves to the other side of the bed as she approaches Clint. The look he gives her is cool, but it’s not the glare she was expecting. It does little to placate her. He might have stepped up his game and done his job when Clint had deteriorated so fast, but it’s not enough to make her forget the rest. He will pay, one way or the other. But then, so will she. No matter how justified her actions were, there will be repercussions, but it’s a price she’s more than willing to pay to keep Clint safe when he can’t do it himself.

Clint’s good hand lies limp on the blanket, and she takes it and folds both of her own around it. Sweat still beads along his hairline, darkening the short strands, but his fingers are ice cold. She tries gently to press some warmth back into them. “Hi there,” she says.

He doesn’t move, but some small sliver of cognitive function must be returning, because a few seconds later his fingers tighten a fraction around hers before going limp again.

“About damn time, Barton,” she huffs when the relief isn’t threatening to take her voice any longer. “Thought you were going to sleep all day.” It’s a ridiculous thing to say, because it’s not like he can do a single thing about the timeline here, but giving each other a hard time is what they do, what they’ve always done, and the familiarity of it makes her feel a little more grounded. 

He gives her hand another squeeze. It’s either a ‘sorry’ or a ‘bite me’. Knowing Clint, it’s probably both.

She leans in closer. “Please, don’t scare me like that again,” she tells him quietly. 

This time the tightening of his fingers is definitely a ‘sorry’.

There’s a knock on the door, and Natasha looks up sharply. So does everyone else. She drops Clint’s hand and straightens. There’s a beat of silence while everyone wait to see who it is. When no one enters, Mitchell’s nurse finally goes to open the door.

It’s Breitling standing there, and Natasha is so very grateful to see him. She finally has an ally in the room. A part of her wishes it was Phil, but Breitling has more authority than Phil around here, so that wish has nothing to do with reason and everything to do with emotion.

Breitling gives Natasha a nod as he closes the door behind him. “Romanoff,” he says in greeting. He heads straight to the bed. “Mark, what do we have here?” he says to Mitchell.

Mitchell looks equally relieved to see Breitling. “Eight tonic-clonic seizures, none longer than twenty seconds. Last one six minutes ago. I gave Diazepam to stop them. Breathing normal, mild tachycardia and hypertension, no fever. Glucose is low, but not critical.” He rattles through the list calmly and concisely. “I’ve already got a full electrolyte and metabolic panel on the way, as well as an extended tox screen.”

Breitling motions for Mitchell to hand over the tablet he’s holding. “Head scans?”

“We double-checked the initial ones when the seizures started, just to make sure we hadn’t missed anything, but there’s no bleeding or swelling. I want to do another round as soon as possible to make sure something hasn’t happened since he arrived.”

Breitling nods, then sweeps his eyes over the people still in the room. “Alright, since things have calmed down, let’s give Agent Barton some space. Everyone except Dr. Mitchell and Agent Romanoff, please leave.”

The room empties out quickly. After the intensity of the past twenty minutes, the quiet is a welcome thing.

Breitling looks down at Clint and tsk’s. “I thought we had a deal, Barton. You don’t land yourself in any of my wards, and I don’t poke you with unnecessarily big needles in incredibly sensitive places.” Clint’s eyes have slid shut, and he mumbles something undecipherable. Breitling waits for a beat, then pats his arm. “That’s okay, you just rest a bit. I’ll chastise you some more later.”

He pulls his glasses from his pockets and puts them on, then starts swiping through information on the tablet. “Don’t worry,” he tells Natasha. “It’s not unusual to be a little out of it after a seizure. Not to mention eight.” He runs his fingers down the screen as he reads, and his eyebrows go up. “And with this amount of diazepam, I’m a frankly a little surprised he stayed awake this long.”

“It’s that thing in his head, isn’t it? It caused this.”

Even she isn’t paranoid enough to think Mitchell had anything to do with the seizures. He might be a bastard with a grudge, but that’s just too extreme.

“It’s a possibility,” Breitling says, “but until we know for sure, we need to eliminate more mundane reasons. We’ll put a rush order on those blood tests.” He looks over at Mitchell who has positioned himself on the other side of the bed, across from Natasha. “How are you doing over there, Mark?”

“Fine. But I’ll be a lot better when this day is over.” Mitchell gives Natasha a pointed look.

“I think we can all relate to that.” Breitling lowers the tablet and looks at the snarl of unconnected wires hanging from the EEG machine. “Let’s set that back up. It will help us figure out a few things.”

“He got agitated last time we tried,” Mitchell tells him.

“I heard. But under the circumstances I think it’s worth another try.” Breitling runs his eyes over Clint. “And besides, it doesn’t look like he’ll give us much trouble right now.” 

The door opens once more, and a nurse comes bustling through the door, a brightly colored windbreaker over her scrubs.

“Sorry it took a while,” she says, a little out of breath. “I was on my way home.” She dumps her purse on the floor in the corner and shrugs out of the jacket, draping it over the back of a chair. She takes a moment to tie her graying hair back in a ponytail, and gives Natasha a one-second smile as her fingers work.

Natasha doesn’t return the smile. She doesn’t recognize this woman. That’s never been an issue in SHIELD medical before, but suddenly it is.

“I don’t think you two have met,” Breitling says, like he can read her mind. “Agent Romanoff, meet Anne Halloway. Anne, meet Agent Romanoff. Anne transferred from L.A. five months ago, but we go way back.”

“ _Way_ back,” Anne says. “Makes me feel old just thinking about it.” She picks up the blood pressure cuff that had been left behind on the floor where Clint had been lying.

“We first worked together in Saudi,” Breitling continues. “In what, ‘02?”

“’03.” Anne hands him the cuff. “And it was the Emirates.”

There’s a ripping sound as Breitling opens the Velcro and fits it over Clint’s arm. “No, I’m pretty sure it was Saudi.”

“Trust me, it was the Emirates. Dubai, to be specific. I’ve never been stationed in Saudi.”

Natasha wonders how transparent she must be right now, because there’s no way this easy exchange is meant for anyone’s benefit but hers. This is obviously not the first time Breitling and his nurse has had to defuse a potentially volatile situation.

“We were just saying that we should hook Agent Barton up to the EEG again,” Breitling tells Anne as he pumps up the cuff. “He got a little upset last time, so we will take it slow and easy.” He looks at Natasha. “And Agent Romanoff is going to stay close and help him stay calm and relaxed, right?”

Natasha nods, hoping she’ll be able to. In the state he is, it’s not a given. 

Clint’s blood pressure is still elevated, but it’s coming down and they get him sitting up. He’s a little more awake now, his eyes are tracking better, but he still hasn’t said a word. Natasha puts her hand on his shoulder and keeps it there as Anne starts working on attaching the electrodes. With any luck, the physical link will help anchor him a little and keep him from unraveling completely.

And she thinks maybe it works, because Clint remains passive, half-dozing where he sits. It’s not until Anne’s reaches the back of his head that he suddenly pulls away with a sharp, cut-off inhalation and ducks his head low. 

“It’s okay,” Anne soothes. “I’m just putting the EEG back.”

Natasha squeezes his shoulder lightly. His muscles suddenly feel like stone. “Relax, you’re fine. Let them work.” 

His fingers are gripping the blanket tightly. His knuckles white. She shakes her head in warning at Anne, who wisely takes a step back.

Natasha tries get eye contact with him, but he won’t look up. “Listen to me,” she says. “You’re okay. They’re just hooking you up to an EEG. It will let us figure out what’s going on, so you need to let them do it.” 

It takes a few seconds, but then he suddenly lets out a shaky breath, and a small fraction of tension leaves his body. But there’s plenty left, so she waits a bit longer before asking, “Are you ready to continue?”

He nods, but he still won’t look at her, and his body language is sending a distinctly different message, so Natasha shakes her head at Anne again. She’d rather err on the side of caution here.

Anne nods and busies herself with the EEG machine, humming under her breath as she sorts out the wires and adjusts settings.

“Mark,” Breitling says. “A word over here?” 

They take their conversation to the door. It’s quiet and short, and a few minutes later Mitchell leaves the room. That’s another massive relief, because even with Breitling here, she doesn’t want him anywhere near Clint.

By then, Clint is as relaxed as he’s likely to get, so she gives Anne the go-ahead to continue. Clint tenses up when Anne starts working, but he stays clear of the panic line, so Natasha lets her get on with it. The only time he’s close is when Anne’s fingers stray too close to the bandage. He flinches, but he stays put.

“Sorry,” Anne says. “Almost done here.”

True to her word, it’s just a matter of seconds before she finishes.

While Clint is sitting up, Breitling takes a closer look at him. He presses his lips into a thin line as he lifts the shirt and sees the deeply bruised stripes across Clint’s skin, left by the cane. A few of the thinner slashes that had drawn blood but had scabbed over has reopened. He asks Anne to go get some topical analgesics and bring the x-rays of Clint’s broken wrist.

Whatever energy Clint had found when the EEC went on has drained out of him, and he struggles to keep his eyes open as Breitling carefully tips his chin up to study his badly scraped up face, then lifts his hand to look at the small, angry burns on his palm.

“They really did a number on you, didn’t they?” Breitling sighs as he eases Clint down onto his side to keep pressure off his abused back.

“Th’bed,” Clint mumbles. “It’s spinning.”

“I don’t doubt it. You’re on some pretty heavy medication. By all rights, you should be sound asleep already.” Breitling smiles wryly. “But I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, you’ve always been a contrary pain in my ass.” He adjusts the oxygen clip on Clint’s finger. “Let me know if you feel sick, I can give you something for that.”

Clint hums something that might be an answer, but he's half-gone already. Natasha leans on the rails and lets them take her weight as her partner slips under into blissful sleep. She drops her head with a soundless sigh and tips it to one side, grimacing at the tightness there. She does the same to the other side. Hopefully Phil is still in the habit of carrying around a bottle of Advil, because there’s a headache hiding in the wings, she can feel it. 

“Could we step outside for a moment?” Breitling asks behind her.

“I’m not leaving,” she says without bothering to turn around.

“I’m not asking you to. I just want to talk to you.”

She thinks about refusing, because leaving Clint is the last thing she wants to do, but Phil is still not going to be there for quite a while, and it’s not wise to antagonize her only ally right now. Reluctantly she follows him to the door. When he pushes it open, the security team leader is standing outside, not three feet away, and judging from the way Breitling startles, he hadn’t expected that. Natasha stops abruptly, two feet short of the threshold. Breitling’s eyes flick between the two of them.

The man has pulled down the black mask from his face and wedged his helmet in under his arm. With his face uncovered, she realizes she knows him. Carlos Batista. Despite the many thousands of names on SHIELD’s payroll, the number of people who work at the level they do is surprisingly small.

Batista tips his chin up in a neutral greeting. He looks relaxed enough, but he was STRIKE before he transferred to security after his first child was born, and Natasha knows there’s no way he’s letting his guard down in a situation like this. She eyes the rest of the security team that’s waiting further down the corridor, and it’s easy to separate the old experienced members from those too green to keep the truth from their body language. They’re expecting trouble.

“If you’re thinking about dragging me out of here, you better call your wife and tell her not to wait up,” she informs him flatly. “You’ll be spending the night in one of these beds.”

Batista shakes his head and starts digging through his front pocked. He fishes out a pack of gum. “Nah, Fury nixed that. I’m just chilling out, pending new orders.”

She takes a deep breath and makes herself step out of the fighting stance her body automatically had moved into. It had been nothing more than a small angling of her torso and her feet positioned for better balance, and she’s sure Breitling hadn’t seen it for what it was, but from the subtle way Batista’s body language matches the de-escalation, it’s clear he hadn’t missed it.

“Glad to hear it,” she says. 

“You know,” he says, “it’s not every day I get a call to escort the Black Widow off the premises.” He holds the pack of gum out, offering her one with a grin. “I’m gonna write about it in my diary.” When she doesn’t take any, he shrugs and offers one to Breitling, who declines politely. Batista pulls out a stick and pops it in his mouth. He balls the wrapper up, and his eyes wander over to the bed and Clint. The amusement fades.

“Heard he came in pretty messed up. How is he?”

“Messed up,” she answers curtly.

“And what’s important right now is that the situation has calmed down,” Breitling cuts in. He gives Natasha a meaningful look. “It has calmed down, _hasn’t it_?”

“Never been calmer.” 

“There you go,” Breitling tells Batista. “You and your men can head out.”

“Sorry, Doc. My orders are to stay right here until further notice.”

“Fair enough,” Breitling sighs, "but would you please stay right here from right over there?” He nods towards the rest of the team. “I don’t need you crowding the doorway.”

“That I can do.” Batista turns and walks away. “Just shout if you need me,” he says over his shoulder. “I’ll be there in a jiffy.”

No doubt, Natasha thinks as she watches him join his team. With his weapon drawn and the rest of them hot on his heels.

Breitling takes a step back and pulls the door closed, shutting them inside the room again. Talking outside is apparently off the table for now.

“Sorry about that. I didn’t know he’d be there.”

“He’s just doing his job.”

“And so am I. But to do that, I need to know what happened here. With Mitchell,” he clarifies.

“Barton was hurting, and he wasn’t doing anything about it.”

“That's not the story I got from him.”

“Shocker.”

“Are you saying he’s lying? That’s a pretty serious accusation.”

“Are you saying _I’m_ lying? That bastard has always had a problem with Barton.” She doesn’t bother keeping the anger from her voice.

Breitling raises his hands. “Listen. I wasn’t here, so I don’t know what happened, but I will look into every step of Barton’s treatment, that I can guarantee. We’ll get this sorted out.”

She crosses her arms over her chest. “Did he deny putting Barton in restraints, too?”

“No, he didn’t. He said he was out of control and a danger to himself.”

“If he’s out of control you nail him with Haldol,” she snaps. “Or whatever fast-acting horse tranquilizer you got lying around this place. The no-restraint order is there for a damn reason.”

“Yes, it is,” Breitling agrees. “Exactly what kind of problem have you seen between Mitchell and Barton?”

“The Loki kind,” she says coldly.

“Loki?” Breitling frowns, looking confused for a long moment, then suddenly he must make the right connections. “You think Mitchell was… What, withholding painkillers because of what happened with Loki? That’s a _very_ serious accusation.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time someone fucked with him because of it.”

Far from it. When Clint had finally been exonerated after the events with Loki, there had been pockets of outrage within the ranks, and they hadn’t been shy about it. SHIELD had imposed a zero-tolerance policy and weeded out his most active and vocal aggressors pretty quickly, but that just meant that the ones that remained learned to keep their mouths shut and their heads down, and that the harassment got more underhanded.

Clint has never been one to take shit from anyone, but he hadn't filed a single complaint that first year and a half, he’d just kept his head down, tiredly telling Natasha to let it go when she seethed at the small, but never-ending injustices. Graham Thistle, a mid-level analyst, had been one of the instigators, and his M.O. had been goading others on to do what he didn’t want to get caught doing. It had come to a head when one of his cronies had taken it a step too far.

Clint had taken part in a rock climbing exercise when an avalanche of small stones and gravel had been deliberately set off from above. It hadn’t been enough to cause any injuries in itself, but it had unbalanced him at a critical point, and he’d lost his perilous grip on the rain-slick, nearly vertical surface. Luckily, the weather and the hundred twenty foot drop had made him strap into a climbing harness and use a rope, clipping it into the bolts that had been drilled into the rock when SHIELD first started using the place. ‘No use dying unless you absolutely have to’ is a philosophy both he and Natasha share.

But despite being clipped in, there had been enough slack on the rope for momentum to slam him head first into the rock face when his fall was abruptly stopped ten feet below.

The resulting concussion had left him with weeks of constant headaches, double vision and nausea. True to form, he had told Natasha to just let it go, and that had been when she finally snapped. She had cursed him out in every goddamn language she knows, and then dragged his sorry, aching ass to Phil. She had paced the floor of the office, furiously listing every insult, every petty, underhanded punishment, every shove and veiled threat she had heard, or heard of. _Everything_.

Clint had sat in a chair with his hands clasped between his knees, his face shuttered as she raged. Phil had listened calmly, and when she’d run out of breath, out of secrets she never wanted to keep, out of righteous anger over the _unfairness_ of it all, he had nodded and thanked her for bringing the extent of it to his attention, then asked for a few minutes alone with Clint.

She had waited outside. A few minutes had turned into half an hour before Clint had finally came out. He had looked exhausted, his eyes subtly bloodshot, and when he’d spotted her waiting outside, he’d called her a fucking tattletale who should learn to mind her own business.

Natasha’s anger had ignited again, and she had geared up for a fight right there in the busy hallway, because enough, _enough_ of this self-castigating bullshit. But instead of rising to the challenge she knows had been written all over her, Clint had surprised her by pulling her into a tight hug. She’d stood there with her cheek mashed hard against his jacket, wondering with sudden startling clarity how long he had ached for her to do this. How long he had wished _someone_ would step in and say ‘stop, no more, this isn’t right' on his behalf, because the guilt wouldn’t let him ask for any kind of mercy for himself.

She sometimes wishes she could show the people who thought he got away too easy the nightmares, the depression, the guilt and grief, the slow self-destruction. There had been nothing easy about being Clint Barton for a very long time after New York.

Breitling keeps looking at her, his frown deepening. “I don’t want to believe any of my people would ever stoop so low. It wasn’t Barton’s choice. It was all Loki.”

“Not everyone feels the same.” 

Breitling runs both hands through his hair with a tired sound. “Until we figure this out, the only ones who will tend to Barton are myself and Anne. Unless his situation deteriorates to the point where I have to call on more people. If that happens, I need your word you won’t interfere. If you do, you’ll be jeopardizing his health, maybe his life, and I won’t hesitate to bring out those horse tranquilizers and use them on you. Do we understand each other?”

She nods and gives the only answer that will work in her favor right now. “Perfectly.”

“Good.” He glances at Clint, then at the monitors. “I expect he’ll be out for quite a few hours, and since he seems to be resting comfortably, I’m going to head out to see what we’ve found out about that thing in his head. I want it out as soon as possible. I’d like Anne to come for a few minutes, too.”

A whisper of unease goes through Natasha. Clint just had a string of seizures, and she’s not sure she wants both Breitling and Anne to leave.

“We’ll be monitoring him remotely,” Breitling reassures her. “The readings from everything he’s hooked up to are piped to the nurses’ station down the hall. It’s always manned, so if something happens I’ll know immediately. Anne won’t be long. I just want her to talk to some of the nurses and try to get some information about the situation with Mitchell. I figure they might be a little more forthcoming if it’s one of their own asking the questions.”

He’s right. It’s all very reasonable, very logical, but it does little to ease the niggling feeling of worry in her. 

“Or Anne stay,” Breitling says when she doesn’t reply. “It’s okay. She can do her sleuthing later.”

“No, it’s fine.” She gives him a tight smile. “It’s fine.”

It actually is fine. Clint stays asleep. Breitling returns a while later to announce that they’ll take him to be scanned again. No one questions it when Natasha goes along. Batista and his team position themselves in front of and behind the small procession as Clint is rolled down the corridor. The black-clad security team is a silent escort, keeping a bit of distance, but they’re there. A very real reminder for her not to cause any problems.

She waits in the control room as they do the first scan. Clint doesn’t even stir when they move him from the bed into the scanner. When it’s done, they take him to another floor for a second one in a different scanner, and it gets crowded in the elevator when Batista and three of his men insist on getting in with them.

Natasha crosses her arm and looks straight ahead at the door. She doesn’t acknowledge them, but she’s very aware of the stun guns strapped to their belts. Batista said Fury had called them off, but that might be just a tactic, empty words to make her drop her guard. This would be a good time to take her down. She doesn’t have the space to maneuver in the elevator, nowhere to go. Then on the other hand, Breitling and Clint are in there with them, and an orderly, so she’s pretty sure they won’t risk the collateral damage. 

* * * 

Back in the room, she pulls the chair over and props her feet up against the side of the bed. With Mitchell gone, or at least out of sight and nowhere near Clint, she’s less on edge. Now it’s just plain worry that’s eating at her. The implant must be bad news if they’re so reluctant to do anything about it, especially if it’s the source of the seizures. They still don’t know if it is, some of the test results aren’t back yet, but from what Breitling says, they’ve already eliminated the most obvious ones, so it’s pointing to whatever the hell they put into Clint’s head.

She pulls her phone out and tries to find something to pass the time. She finally settles on a game Clint must have sneaked in when she wasn’t looking. It must be Clint, because she doesn’t leave her phone unattended with anyone else, and no one else would even think about downloading a cutsey game with sparkly effects and pink hearts popping up to her phone. 

It’s a kid’s game, but it still takes an embarrassingly long time for her to figure it out, and she has finally managed to capture the magic glitter wand when the phone rings. She winces at the volume. And at the ringtone that accompanies the name on the screen. Shoot to Thrill. Tony. She rolls her eyes. Yet another reason to start keeping her phone away from Clint. He finds it way too entertaining to mess with.

“What did you find out?” she asks.

“The closest place SI has that ticks your boxes is in Cleveland. They’re ready for you if you want to take him there. There’s a medical transport on standby for you. Just say the word.”

She smiles tiredly. “Having a billionaire on call sure is convenient sometimes.”

“ _Multi_ -billionaire. And I knew it. You only love me for my money.” Tony’s voice turns serious. “How’s he doing?” 

“He just had eight seizures, so not great.”

“Shit,” he mutters. “With that in mind, is moving him still on the table?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Mitchell is out of the picture, but she doesn’t want to close the door on that option just yet. “SI has the information they need to start working on this, right?” she asks. “The scans and the data and the rest.”

“They’re still not sure what they’re supposed to work on. SHIELD, paranoid bastards that you are, don’t want to send the raw data. They’re requesting my people to work on site in Seattle with it. Naturally I called Fury right away to get the 4-1-1 on the whole thing.” He hums. “You know, waking him up in the middle of the night is weirdly gratifying. I might have to do that again.”

“Sorry to rain on your parade, but he wasn’t sleeping.” 

“Dammit.” He sounds disappointed.

“Yeah, well, better luck next time.” There’s a beat of silence, and she preempts the question that she feels coming. “Someone put something in his head.” She glances at Clint. His head has tipped to the side in his sleep, away from her, and she can see the edge of the innocent-looking white bandage that’s taped down at the nape of his neck.

“ _Someone_ put _something_ in his head?” Tony echoes. He snorts. “God, I love how forthcoming you guys are with details when asking people to pull your asses out of the fire.”

“I don’t _know_ anything more,” she snaps. “It’s an implant of some kind, and it’s jacked into his brain. They can’t figure out how, and they don’t want to risk digging around in there before they do, so the damn thing is still in there. They don’t recognize the technology.”

“What does it do?”

“They don’t know. It could be what triggered the seizures, but we’re not sure.”

“So in summary, you don’t know what it is, what it does, how it’s connected, or how to get it out.”

Natasha slumps back in the uncomfortable chair. “Yeah. That’s why we called you.”

“You’ll owe me one. I’ll collect in the form of you becoming my source of inside SHIELD intel.”

A small spike of resentment goes through her. Sure, the Avengers are a sometimes-team, but she should know that means little, there are strings attached to every generous gesture made. For some illogical reason she hadn’t expected it from Tony, and that just feeds the bitterness.

Tony must read her silence loud and clear. “Jesus,” he huffs. “I’m _kidding_. You seriously think I need an inside source to get to all of SHIELD’s dirty secrets?”

That’s true. Fury has done what he can to shore up SHIELD’s cyber security, but there’s not much anyone can do when Tony Stark puts his mind to something.

“Anyway,” he continues. “The good news are that my guys are on their way to join SHIELD’s little team of hobby scientists as we speak.”

“Keep me updated?” Breitling will probably keep her in the loop, but two sources of info never hurts.

“You bet.”

They end the call, and she settles back and tries to get comfortable. She has nothing much to do now, except wait until Phil gets there. She brings up the game again, but puts it down almost immediately. It’s just past four in the morning, and she’s operating on far too few hours of sleep to handle something that ridiculous. She runs her hand over her eyes, closes them for a few moments. When she opens them again, she’s surprised to see Clint watching her from under heavy eyelids.

She puts her feet down. “That’s not sleeping,” she chides.

“Thought of you.” His words are smeared out into a heavy slur under the weight of the drugs. “Back when they—” His hand makes a slow movement towards his neck, but before he gets there he lets it drop. “Thought of you.”

She huffs out a dark laugh. “Jesus, Clint. I don’t treat you _that_ bad, do I?”

“No,” he mumbles. “You’re good to me.” He lifts his hand a few inches again, fusses with his fingers until she reaches over and sorts out the wire to the oxygen clip so there’s no tension on it. “My good place.”

She guides his hand down onto the blanket again as an uncomfortable mix of warmth and pity rises in her chest. “That’s a pretty awful good place you got there, Barton.” His fingers are a little warmer now, but they’re still cool to the touch, and she keeps her hand on top of his.

He makes a sound of disagreement.

“You don’t even believe in that stuff,” she reminds him. “Pseudo-psycho bullshit that doesn’t work in real life. That’s what you’ve always said.”

“Doesn’t.” He sighs and she watches his eyes slide shut. “Not during, but in between. After.”

She knows what he means. Consciously detaching from that kind of pain when it’s happening to you is supremely difficult. When it’s over it’s easier to find a safe and comfortable memory to slip into. It’s never a matter of complete dissociation. At least it’s not for her. It’s just a few inches of padding between her and the situation, a way to dull the edges of pain and keep her mind from thinking too much about the next round.

He turns his hand, and she lets him lace his clumsy fingers with hers. “Remember Skye?” he asks.

She spends a moment trying to attach a face to the name before it clicks. Skye. As in Isle of Skye. A few years ago the two of them had spent four days there after a long string of jobs with little downtime between them. Most hadn’t been very dramatic, but even those jobs come at a cost; days or weeks or months of never letting their guards down, of always trying to predict what’s going to happen next, of assessing risks and adjusting plans and exit strategies accordingly, of never _ever_ relaxing. Even after all these years and with all the experience they both have, it’s not effortless. That’s why they take off sometimes, separately or together, leaving SHIELD and their work behind for a few days. 

“I remember Skye,” she tells him. 

He lifts the cast and touches the side of his head. “’s where I went. In here.”

She opens her mouth to ask why the hell he chose Skye of all places when he’d been complaining the entire time they’d been there. It had been four days of cold, drizzling rain that had soaked them during their walks up and down the deserted beaches (which _he_ had insisted that they take). At the last second she stops the words from leaving her tongue. Skye hadn’t stuck in her mind as anything extraordinary. Sure, it had been pretty enough, in a rugged, winter-barren kind of way, but despite Clint’s complaining, it had obviously made a much bigger impression on him if it was the place he defaulted to when hurt and alone.

“It was nice,” she settles on. No use taking his good memories away from him, even if they’ve clearly been revised in his head.

“Then I thought ‘bout killing ‘em all. Was even nicer.”

Natasha looks at the dark bruises on his arm that disappear up under the short sleeve. At some point during his captivity he’d been kicked hard enough that the tread of a boot sole is partially imprinted on his skin. The mental image of Clint on the ground, curled up, with his arm raised in useless defense flashes through her head.

“A little carnage makes everything better,” she agrees grimly.

“What happened to th’ dogs?”

They hadn’t encountered any dogs on Skye, so she deduces he’s talking about the pack of snarling guard dogs that had charged the extraction team when they’d retrieved him. The dogs had been quickly and decisively taken care of, treated no differently than any other threat to their lives. She knows Clint wouldn’t have hesitated a second to do the same if he’d been in their situation, but he’s always had a soft spot for dogs, and thinking about dead ones now won’t do him any good. So she lies.

“They’re fine.” 

“They weren’t bad dogs. Just… unloved, I think.”

She snorts. “Sometimes I think you like animals better than people. You have zero problems taking a headshot, but God forbid you find a family of ducklings on the highway. You’ll slam on the brakes, in rush hour traffic, and cry if you can’t save them. Big, bad Hawkeye. Admit it, you’re nothing but a massive softie.”

“All m’shmallow,” he grins. “Shh. Don’t tell no one.”

“Your secret is safe with me. Good thing I’m around to make up for your disgusting fluffiness. There’s nothing soft about me.”

“Not true.”

“I dare you to name one soft thing about me.” He begins to speak, but she interrupts him. “No, really, Barton. I _dare_ you.”

He does an admirable job of letting her know he’s rolling his eyes even though they’re still closed. “Fine, you’re not soft. You’re, you’re…” He suddenly snickers. “You’re the grah’m cracker to my squishy m’shmallow.”

She stares at him, then starts laughing. “Wow. Did you seriously just compare us to a s’more?” 

“A _deadly_ s’more.”

“Right, ‘cause that’s so much better.” She puts her elbow on the bedrail and props her chin on her hand with a smirk. “So, if you're the marshmallow and I’m the graham cracker, I guess we both know who the chocolate of this Delta s’more is. Tell me, Barton, is this your roundabout way of asking for a threesome with Phil and me? With you in the middle?”

Clint grins, too fuzzy from the heavy-duty pharmaceuticals to veer down the road of defensive irritation that is his usual reaction whenever she teases him about his decade-long, half-assed pining after Phil. “Nah, you’d be scary in bed,” he says.

“Your loss,” she shrugs.

There have always been overtones to his and Phil’s professional relationship. Natasha had picked up on it from day one, but nothing has ever come of it. Their mutual reluctance to address the issue has annoyed the hell out of her many times over the years, but they’re grown-ass men, and she has no right to interfere in this part of their lives, so some pointed teasing has been her only addition to the stalemate.

For Phil it’s always been the power imbalance of their working relationship that’s held him back. Clint’s excuses are vaguer. She’s pretty sure he’s never put words to them, even if his head, but she figures they basically boil down to him rather keeping the status quo than risk fucking things up beyond repair. And there’s actually some measure of self-insight in there; Clint self-sabotages like nobody’s business when he gets a shot at something good. He doesn’t mean to, but he just can’t seem to help himself.

And Natasha has to admit to a small amount of shameful relief that they haven’t tried it. It’s not that she doesn’t want them to have that, of course she does, she wants them to be happy, but the odds are against them. They would no doubt be consummate professionals about it if they tried and failed, and they’d be able to work together just as flawlessly as always, but things _would_ be different, it’s inevitable. Natasha is a deeply selfish person for not wanting what the three of them have to change.

Yeah. It’s quite possible that she’s a bit too much like Clint for comfort. 

“If Phil was chocolate, he’d be the dark, exclusive kind,” Clint tells her sagely. “Like, _super_ exclusive.”

“Valrhona level,” she nods. “85%, minimum.”

He hums happily. “I like chocolate.” Then his grin wanes, and his brows scrunch into a pained angle. The color his face had regained is suddenly gone.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

He swallows hard. “Think I’m gonna throw up.” 

Natasha raises the head of the bed so he’s half-sitting up again, then looks around for a bowl, but there’s nothing. She gets the trashcan from the corner and puts it in front of him. It’s not a second too soon, because he makes a pitiful sound as he hunches over it. There’s not much in his stomach to bring up, but that doesn’t stop his body from trying. 

“Jesus,” he groans when the heaving finally stops. He coughs wetly but doesn’t move, head still held low over the trashcan.

“Better?” 

He shakes his head, then he’s hit with another unproductive round of retching. Natasha presses the button next to the bed to summon Breitling or Anne. 

Anne arrives first, closely followed by Breitling. By then, a sheen of sweat glistens on Clint’s skin, and his skin tone has gone from pale to white. Breitling sends Anne to get something for the nausea. She’s back quickly, and it goes straight into Clint’s IV.

“You should feel better soon,” Breitling tells him, and in a lull between Clint’s retching, he exchanges the trashcan for an emetics bag. “It’s probably the drugs. They can make you nauseous.” His eyes keep returning to the monitors as he talks. Clint’s heart rate is climbing. His blood pressure is following suit, the numbers ticking higher and higher as Natasha watches.

“Other than the obvious, how are you feeling?” Breitling asks.

Clint groans and brings the cast up to his head, pressing it against his temple. Before Natasha or Breitling can react, his fingertips brush over one of the EEC wires. He freezes for a moment, then he drops the bag and grabs blindly for the wires with his good hand.

She makes a grab for his hands, but stumbles back when the cast smacks her across the mouth as Clint tries to fight her off. There isn’t enough force behind it to cause any real damage, she doesn’t even taste blood, but she can feel it swelling. 

In that split second when she’s regaining her balance, he abandons the snarl of wires and starts clawing at the back of his head like he’s trying to dig the implant out with his fingers.

Natasha hears Mitchell’s words in her head. _It could kill him_.

She catches the cast and snatches his hand away. On the other side of the bed, Breitling does the same with Clint’s other hand. Clint pull’s at Natasha’s grip with a strangled noise, struggling to get free. When that fails, he wrenches his body away from her, twisting as he goes.

“Stop. Clint, _stop_.” She doesn’t let go, and the bedrails dig painfully into her midsection as he drags her halfway across the bed in his attempt to get away. Even weak and drugged beyond lucidity, he still has seventy pounds on her.

“Don’t,” Clint gasps raggedly. “Please, don’t.”

“Agent Barton, it’s okay, you’re in Medical and no one is going to hurt you.” Breitling looks over his shoulder at Anne. “Diazepam,” he tells her. “Get it reading just in case. And get me everything on what he’s been given this far,” he calls after her as she hurries out of the room. “I need to know what, when, and how much.”

“Calm down,” Natasha says. “Clint, calm down.” 

He keeps fighting, but to her relief, he’s flagging fast, and it doesn’t take long until he simply gives up. He sits there, panting heavily, curled in on himself as much as he can while they’re holding his arms away from his body.

“You’re okay,” she says again, and it’s the same useless reassurance she’s been giving him since she arrived. He’s not okay. He’s hurting and disoriented, he just had a string of seizures and there’s an implant in his head. He’s _not_ okay.

She tightens her grip as Clint ducks forward with a hoarse cry. For a moment she think it’s a trick to make them let go of him, she knows him too well to put that past him, but then a massive flinch goes through him and his breath catches. Then another, and no, that’s not an act. That’s _pain_. 

“What’s wrong?” Breitling asks. “What hurts?” He gets no answer, just a shuddering exhalation that ends in a whimper.

“I’m going to let go now,” he says, “but you can’t scratch at your neck like that. Do you understand?”

Still no response, but at least Clint doesn’t immediately go for his head when Breitling cautiously lets go, he just pulls the arm in closely in front of his chest and folds over deeper. Natasha keeps her hold on him, still not trusting completely that he won’t try again. 

“Watch him,” Breitling instructs her and heads to the wall-mounted phone. “I’ll tell Anne to get some painkillers.” The call is short, seconds only, then he’s back at Clint’s side.

There’s not much they can do for Clint other than wait for Anne to come back. Natasha eventually dares let go of him, and he just pulls his arm in and cradles the cast in front of him. They try to coax him to lie back down, but he refuses to move from his hunched over position and the pained cries keep coming, gradually crumbling into sharp, hitching sobs that more than anything tells her just how far past his limits he is right now.

“Is this how it was last time?” Breitling asks. “This bad?”

“Yes.”

“Was he able to tell you anything? What was hurting?”

She shakes her head. “He didn’t say much, just that he hurt all over. And that the pain kept moving.”

Anne finally comes hustling back into the room, and relief floods Natasha when she sees Phil right on her heels. His mouth is a grim line as he takes in the scene. Breitling and Anne immediately get busy sorting out the medication, and Phil crosses the floor, joins her by the bed. He’s still in his field gear. The Kevlar vest peeks out from under his unzipped jacket.

“How’s he doing?” he asks. He looks over at Breitling, not waiting for an answer. “How long has this been going on?”

“A few minutes. I’m going to give him something for it now,” Breitling says without looking up from the tablet he’s swiping his finger across quickly. “I just need to find out what’s already in his system before I decide what to use.”

Phil smells like fire. Not the clean smell of burning wood, but of destruction. Melted plastic, burning electronics and construction material. There are traces of soot and dirt on his dark clothes, and she wants to ask what went down, but Clint whole body suddenly jerks, and he curls up against the bedrails, his breath stuttering and wheezing like he’s taken a blow to his solar plexus.

“Kev,” Phil calls, his voice tight.

“Coming.” Breitling puts the tablet on the rolling table and picks one of the many vials, filling a syringe. “You’ll feel better very soon,” he tells Clint when he pushes the content of the syringe into the IV.

Soon can’t come fast enough for Clint. It can’t come soon enough for Natasha, either, who is left to stand there helplessly counting the minutes. 

“You okay, Natasha?” Phil asks, his voice low. 

“I’m fine,” she says. She doesn’t take her eyes off the face of the clock. 

The furrow between Breitling’s brows deepens as more time pass and Clint isn’t showing any sign of improvement. Phil bends over Clint, tries to comfort him, but he’s unreachable. His eyes are squeezed tightly shut against the pain that leaves him shaking and sweating.

Phil straightens up. “Can’t you give him more?” he finally asks Breitling.

“If there’s no effect in another few minutes, I will.”

There’s not, and Clint gets another dose. Breitling heads back to the phone and has a quiet conversation with someone on the other end, his fingers tapping tensely against the wall by the phone cradle as he speaks. One of the machines starts beeping. The heart rate monitor. A red light blinks angrily next to the display, which is showing numbers that are much too high. Anne sidles in and pushes a button. The beeping stops, but the light keeps flashing.

It’s a horrible waiting game that seems to drag on forever, because Clint’s pain isn’t diminishing at all. Phil flinches with Clint when the gasping sobs suddenly rise into a short, agonized scream. Natasha clenches her teeth against the sound. 

“Jesus Christ, Kev. Do something,” Phil snaps.

Breitling hangs up and returns to the rolling table with the medication. “I’ll try something else.” He lifts a vial and turns it around to read the label, then puts it back and picks up another. “IV ibuprofen. Let’s see if that helps at all.” Breitling holds his hand out for the new syringe Anne just unpacked.

“Ibuprofen? How is _ibuprofen_ going to help with this?” Phil asks. 

“Trust me, this isn’t anything like you get at CVS.”

“Why not morphine?”

Breitling loads the syringe. “Because the notes say he’s already maxed out from last round. Any more opiates wouldn’t be safe.” 

“That’s bullshit,” she Natasha growls. “You didn’t see him. He wouldn’t have been in that kind of pain if they’d given him that much.”

“I don’t believe that Mitchell—”

“You don’t know that!”

“I know because I know my staff,” Breitling answers sharply. “I know because that much diazepam should have knocked him out for about two days. And I just gave him more ketamine than we use to put people out for surgery. He’s still awake and in pain, so it’s obvious he’s not reacting right to anything right now.”

That’s the moment Clint goes into another seizure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's hope it doesn't take another two months for part 4 to come up.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Room 101](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27147191) by [JinxQuickfoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JinxQuickfoot/pseuds/JinxQuickfoot)




End file.
